On Wed, 28 May 2003, S Woodside wrote:
On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 02:01 PM, David Morris wrote:
Junk email on the other hand has an extremely low cost of transmission
in
the current economic model.
There is a difference between the people selling the product, and the
people sending the spam. Usually not the same people. The SELLERS do
have a transmission cost as they must pay the spammers to spam people
for them. Admittedly not much, but the sellers are a much easier target
than the spammers. Drive their costs up significantly and you dry up
the spam market by implication (for types 1 and 2, which at least for
me are the bulk of my 50 or so spams a day).
In one sense, you are agreeing with my basic premis .. the economic model
most change. Where we may disagree is whether any particular proposal will
make a significant change is costs. A cursory look at some small portion
of my spam suggests that the SELLERS have a very small physical footprint
in a very high percentage of the cases. Easy to morph into another entity.
Roughly $500 to incorporate in the US which at the minimum provides a
additional layer to the onion which must be removed to get at the real
people involved. If they move the whole operation to some carribean island
nation, it is no big deal to ship many of the products I'm offered these
days. For example, one homeopathic medical (oximoron I know) supply
company uses third party agents to take orders. The base company, which
has been in business for years, ships the product directly to the
consumer. I doubt that such a company would be found guilty of spamming if
one of these agents chose to use spam to generate business.
There are also international communications treaties, first amendment
rights, etc. which I suspect would preclude out and out blocking of
internet traffic from our infamous carribean neighbor.
Hence my conclusion that the only realistic way to alter the economics is
to collect the fee up front using a combination of protocols, social and
legal provisions designed to avoid or absolutely minimize the free
exchange of email/information between related parties.
Such fees could also support the new PKI, server, etc. infrastructure
needed to introduce other aspects of any possible technical solutions.
Dave Morris